Monday, October 5, 2015

Unpacking family secrets, thanks to Patrick Kennedy's lead

Once while serving as a copywriter for a local auto
dealer, I received firm guidelines from the owner of the dealership for all
prospective copy.

“Never, never write an advertisement for radio or
television that is directed to teachers, lawyers or doctors! They are the
cheapest people on the planet. Also, do not read or follow the consumer opinion
polls, because we all know that people will and do not tell anyone their real
preference or the reasons for that preference,” came his succinct and intense
instruction. “If they think you represent one company’s product, they will tell
the pollster that they prefer something else,” he continued. Today, that dealer
might say something like, “Teachers, Lawyers and Doctors are not influenced by
the same pitch as the ordinary buyer and there must be specific messages
targeted to different demographics.” Of course, that car dealer would never
have uttered those words “in public” fearing the kind of backlash that his car
sales quota could not sustain.

And we all say
things in private that we dare not utter in public. That is how family secrets
become family secrets.

We all know that hypocrisy is very much a part of
our culture, as are avoidance, denial and secrecy. Son of the late Senator Ted
Kennedy, Patrick, has written and published a book that exposes the secrets of
his family of origin, including the alcohol dependency of both his father and
his mother and the veil of secrecy that surrounded both of their dependencies,
as well as the denial of any problem even after the family conducted an
intervention with his father. Telling the Senator that his drinking was
impacting each member of the family resulted in his father’s silent exit from
the room, without uttering a word, following by an extended period of icy silence
and ostracism between the father and his son. With the book, Patrick has opened
the wounds of his family, and incurred the wrath of those remaining who hold
fast to the code of silence that has wrapped the family in secrecy for decades.
Even when his father took him, at twelve, to the site of the Chappaquiddick car
crash in which an aide to Senator Bobby Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopoechne died, he did
not hear the story, so painful was its scar on the Senator/driver of the car,
that the silence was preserved. Only through his research in newspapers and
books written by those who had delved into the details of the incident did son
Patrick become familiar with his father’s truth.

Patrick Kennedy was Leslie Stahl’s guest on 60
Minutes last night. He now works in his own foundation to bring mental illness,
from which he suffers (bi-polarity), along with his own addiction to alcohol,
now moderated and controlled somewhat by daily AA meetings, and a new wife who
refused to marry him unless and until he stopped drinking, with three children
and a fourth expected, to the public debate, and out of the shadows.

The alienation from his father continued from the
day of the intervention until Patrick, by then a Congressman from Rhode Island,
proposed a bill calling for increased expenditures on mental health measures
and defended it on the floor of the House. The now proud father finally opened
the door of his life to his previously estranged son.

It is the stuff of legend that Patrick Kennedy’s
uncle, the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, continued his philandering
long after his election to the White House, a pattern the details of which were
kept secret by a compliant media, dependent as it considered itself, on the
access to the president for their very survival as reporters. Without access,
there would be no stories; without stories, they would have no job. It really
is that basic.

Keeping secrets, while presenting a smiling face to
the public, is a feature of millions of homes from the history of too many
countries, states and towns and villages. Young women who became pregnant for
decades suddenly disappeared from their home towns, to follow their pregnancy,
and preserve the reputation of their families, in a different location. Even
today, the disclosure of files including names, account numbers and addresses
of millions of individuals who have allegedly accessed the services of a
website that engages in providing sexual partners for married clients gets
front page prominence in daily papers, threatening both the marriages and the
reputations of public figures.

Yet this hypocrisy is not restricted to the rich and
the powerful. It occurs right on our neighbourhood streets, in our church pews,
and in our community organizations. It is an integral part of our cultural DNA,
and Patrick Kennedy, while heroic and admirable in bringing light into the
family closets, will likely be considered another Don Quixote, in too many
quarters. Family secrets, ecclesial secrets, business secrets, political
secrets….these are the stuff of deception, drama, conflict and often tragedy,
both in their cover-up and in their disclosure. Conflicts of interest, for
example, accompany too many politicians who serve in jurisdictions where
neophyte reporters are too innocent and also too inexperienced and therefore
too cautious to expose them. Small towns, and big cities continue to operate
with their unique “family compact” comprising the insiders who have and who
exercise power over many of the decisions that are taken, allegedly in the public
interest. Developers, for example, are renowned for padding the pockets of
aldermen, in order to achieve the needed permits for their real estate
developments. And we’re not talking exclusively about third world countries,
where corruption is so rife that it constitutes the primary path to power.

Also on 60
minutes last night, we learned of a French priest who has spent his career in
ministry researching and finding mass graves of Jews, graves that were filled
in the Second War. He is proving that not all of the Holocaust deaths occurred
in the gas chambers of the concentration camps. Thousands of Jews were herded
onto farm fields, in which ditches had been dug, lined-up along those ditches
and shot, often from the back, toppling them into the ditches. Respect for the
Jewish tradition of not disinterring dead bodies, this highly sensitive and
determined priest merely records the co-ordinates of the locations of these
mass graves, without erecting anything on their surface, in order to prevent
vandalism and execration. According to the report on 60 Minutes, he has
discovered some 1700+ sites, along with still living witnesses to these
atrocities. Some accounts are so despicable that we learned that mothers were
required to hold their babies while they were executed first, and then the
mother was shot by these inhumane firing squads.

There is
little doubt that, decades from now, grad students will uncover many of the
documents, including videos, instagram pics, utube images, that have already
been recorded by the Islamic terrorists, for their recruitment and also their
legacy. Secrets thatnever came to the
light of day will be unpacked before thesis advisors, degree panels and
eventually by the public at large. Even today, we are learning more about the
current administration in Canada, some of whose highly respected and placed
advisors, such as one named Carson, were allegedly manipulating the public
purse for their own benefits while serving as senior to the Prime Minister.

We have all read stories about gay clergy,
participating in relationships, under cover of the secrecy of their supervisors
who, too, were gay; yet when this charade was uncovered, all participants
denied their complicity. Preserving one’s “calling” is regarded as far more
important than telling the truth, even though the truth is central to the
discipleship of a religious.

In my family, stories of my grandfather’ attempt to
take his life, following my own father’s hunting misadventure resulting in the
death of his hunting buddy, linked to my own father’s overt move to take his
own life, when I was twelve, were never discussed openly in our family. Even
when they were introduced to my father, he vehemently denied their veracity,
notbeing willing or able to withstand
the fallout of such disclosure. On my mother’s side, her persistent physical
and emotional abuse of both my sister and me was never openly dealt with, even
when, at thirteen, I wrote a letter to my father’s two sisters, detailing some
of her more heinous abuse. Stories, too, of my mother’s demand that my father,
as a young husband, choose between parties and alcoholon the one hand and his marriage on the
other, were never discussed. Demonstrating actions and attitudes that today
would be likely from what we know as a “dry drunk” (one who exhibits all the
traits of one who is dependent on alcohol), without ever taking responsibility
for her behaviour, my mother was in effect “the elephant in the room” through
her total consumption of all of the oxygen in every room she visited. No one
ever saw the welts on my arms, legs, shoulders and even neck, following one of
the beatings. I merely covered them with long sleeves and long pants, high
collars and, most importantly, total and complete silence.

Proud to a fault, neither my sister nor I would have
dared open the closet on our family’s hidden secrets. We would have been beaten
even more severely than was already the case. In one’s childhood and
adolescence, one knows only what one has experienced, and nothing about the
emotional or mental turbulence going on in the lives of those who seem to be
the source of so much turbulence, pain, projection and impunity. I often
wished, in my adolescence, that my father had been able and willing to take me
and my sister and leave our family home. However, divorce and separation, even
temporarily, was deeply and profoundly frowned upon, even ridiculed in the
1950’s and early 1960’s, and would likely have resulted in as much pain for him
as full disclosure from eithermy sister
or me. There was certainly another complicating factor: my father, perhaps
recalling his early life and sworn commitment to abstinence from alcohol,
feared my mother, and was simply unable to confront her and/or her abuse of
their children.

And so, our family secrets went to church with us
each Sunday morning for decades, without so much as a hint ever slipping out
from the vault of family drama, locked in each person’s body, heart and mind.
Our family secrets also accompanied me to twelve years of piano lessons, and to
thirteen years of schooling, and to many years of summer employment. Those
secrets went off the university with me, although none of my luggage would have
uncovered their existence. They joined the fraternity with me; they served on
student council with me; they hosted a campus formal dance with me; and they
failed to graduate with me, at the appropriate time when my “class” was
graduating.I did not once think about how I was carrying those beatings and
those verbal scars of rejection, alienation and lack of acceptance by my mother
in all of those chapters of my life. What I knew and cared about was that I was
“free” and “away from home” and “out from under” her contempt and abuse. And those welts not only scar the body; more
significantly they scar one’s identity with a conviction of being “not good
enough”….Otherwise, why would those beatings even have to take place, if I were
not doing, or not doing, something outside what was acceptable? There must be
something “wrong” with me, since I knew intimately and without doubt that none
of my friends were undergoing anything even remotely similar. Were they
“better” than I?
Was their mother more compassionate, or more duped, or more long-suffering, or
more engaged with her partner so that discipline was a shared responsibility?
Of course, I never learned the reasons why my friends were not being abused.

It was not until much later, after graduation from
university, and after teaching for well over two decades, that my life began to
disintegrate; my marriage fell spstrt; I entered therapy to begin a discernment
process as to who it really was that had emerged from this psycho-drama of
early childhood. And then, I decided that, rather than enter a doctoral program
in one of the academic disciplines, such as English or History, both of which
were interesting and even compelling in their own way, I decided that a stint
in seminary, where I believed then, and still do today, I might spend some time
looking “inward,” reflecting on some of the pain that had not been resolved,
reading some of the stories of others who had written, prayed and reflected on
their dark nights, without knowing anything about what might be the outcome of
all this “internal processing, additional therapy, spiritual direction, and
more walking and more digging deeper into emotional identity.

I had never even known that I did not know the words
that would or could name my feelings, prior to entering seminary. I did not
know that other men, of my age, were also on a journey to find their emotional
centre, their spiritual identity and their life path for the ensuing second
half of the chronology, should there be a second half. And then, I began to
discover that I was the agent and the origin of many of my screw-ups, that the
world did not really care how I lived, or even who I was. They saw a face,
asked a few questions, debated the purpose of active ministry and the real
meaning of evangelism, attended seminars and chapel services, rehearsed their
own homilies and their readings in preparation for their participation in daily
chapel services, of both morning and evening varieties.

I enrolled in a chaplaincy training program, which
required a highly focussed and attentive verbatim of each encounter with each
patient in a large suburban Toronto hospital, then presented to a supervisor
and classmates, each of whom were free to ask the kind of penetrating questions
like, “Why did you say that? That’smore
of your shit, and has nothing to do with the condition or situation of the
patient.!” These were riveting sessions, compelling and twisting though they
were; they demanded, not requested, a level of both honesty and openness eve,
vulnerability to which I had never been exposed. Even the many novels had not
penetrated into the deepest darkest corners of the psyches of all of the characters
between the covers. Many of the manuscripts told stories of the emotional life
through something I later learned from T.S. Eliot, was called the “objective
correlative” the metaphor, and the figures of speech on which the narrative was
hung. And while there is a significant overlap between the imaginative
presentation of a fictional narrative and one’s personal biography, given that
both use metaphor, simile and personification extensively, there is a degree of
detachment in the literature, unless and
until one knows the experience of the novelist. And even then, there is a kind
of veil of protection that keeps the most private details locked away from the
heat and the glare of public scrutiny. Family secrets are nevertheless shared
in most novels, although the actual characters and the actual times and places
are hidden by changes permitted by the genre.

Two years of pastoral counselling training in
parallel to the seminary work provided additional exposure to the issues of personal
crisis, family secrets, repressed feelings and an opportunity to encounter all
of this in what I can only hope was a healthy and healing and caring
environment in the counselling room. My memories of some of the best encounters
with clients come out of adolescents who were referred to the centre by the
courts. Their experiences in their families were so familiar to me, although I
had fortunately not crossed the line into the judicial system in my own pattern
of self-sabotage.

The lasting imprint of the abuse is that one does
not really believe that one deserves a life of success. Consequently, one
enters situations, engages, and then too often, finds something or someone who
triggers all the repressed angers, frustrations, unresolved conflicts and
memories from the previous several decades. Only then, is one able to see the
patterns of the pursuit of perfection, for example, to rid my mind of
punishment potential, (why would anyone wish to punish me, if I were doing
things correctly?) and then, I learned that even that approach put others on
the defensive, made them potentially envious, or jealous, or snide and abusive and
they called my “Jesus” in a mocking reference to their contempt for my
lifestyle.

And then, I had to re-evaluate on a daily basis,
both the meanings of others’ actions and words, and their import to me, as well
as how a newer and more insightful me might proceed without resorting to
self-sabotage. And that path continues to unfold each day, with struggles and
with the care and compassion of a loving and empathic wife. And together we are
putting one foot in front of the other, without falling or stubbing our toes
every day.

And those secrets, the unpacking of which will continue
to long as I draw breath, will, even with this partial unpacking, continue to
ripple through the pride and the shame of those members of my family who may
still be unfamiliar with their magnitude. And for that I can say, I apologize,
but do not recant. I understand but do not completely grasp the totality of the
gift of the buried pain that is still to emerge from my unconscious.

As the Pope reminds everyone he meets, “Please pray
for me, a sinner!” and yet this sinner is not permitting his sin to define his
identity, nor his history nor his future. We can only hope that Patrick Kennedy
is not permitting such a sophisticated self-sabotage to encumber his life, or
that of his wife, children and family either.